To Men On Father’s Day

To Men On Father’s Day

I have been asked by a dear sister in the faith to do a sermon to men as if it were my last sermon or my dream sermon. Hey, when you get a good suggestion my motto is use it. So, put on your seat belts, men, for here we go!

Men, I am as you are, so as I challenge you, I challenge myself. Don’t fold your arms and glare at me until you hear me out. Men like to give advice, but they do not often take it well. Knowing that, I ask you to bear with me.

Contrary to some of the cultural concepts, in order to be a real man, I first encourage you to be the child! You say, "Wait a minute! I thought you were talking to men!" I am. That is why I start with the child and I do not mean the psychobabble about getting in touch with your inner child. I want you to be a child!

Luke 18:17 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein. KJV

I think this is absolutely great!! You do not have to receive it as a scholar, or a warrior, or a tycoon, but as a child. We men feel we must always have the answers. We must always be strong! We cannot fail! Unfortunately, we do not have all the answers. We are not always strong. We have our weak moments and we fail and sometimes fail miserably and totally!

"Jesus Loves Me" was originally written for adult worship services, but somewhere that changed and it became relegated to the children’s services. I was thrilled to hear it sung in the evening service last week because all of us children were there and needed to hear the simplicity of the truths in that great song.

God knows the truth about men. He knows that we need to acknowledge our limitations and rely upon Him as a child does his father. Rather than flexing our muscles, we need to stretch out our hands to receive from Him! Rather than bending our backs to handle the load, we need to bend our knees so that He can choose to remove or share the load with us.

How does a child receive things? A child receives them in the most incredibly pure faith on the planet. A child asks a thousand questions, but he will accept the answer of his father as the absolute and final authority without question. At least, a small child who has not yet learned distrust will do so. He will jump into his father’s arms because he trusts him no matter how high it seems to him or how afraid he might be. If his father tells him to jump, he will do so believing that his father will catch because his father said that he would.

This is how we must accept the kingdom of God. We may have a thousand questions of God. He may answer only half for now until we can handle some of the tough answers. Some questions He may never answer. Some we need not know the answers and others are just reserved until we get on the other side of glory. However, what answers He does give us we must accept as the absolute and final authority without question. When He says jump, we must dive out into the unknown though we quake with fear because a loving Father has said that He would catch us. That is faith and we cannot receive Christ’s salvation and ultimately the kingdom without this childlike faith.

Until you can be the child, you can never be the man and you must be the man! We grow up chronologically leaving childhood behind as we mature into men in the flesh. In the spirit, we must always be children before God even while we are men in the world!

1 Samuel 4:9 Be strong, and quit yourselves like men, O ye Philistines, that ye be not servants unto the Hebrews, as they have been to you: quit yourselves like men, and fight. KJV

1 Cor 16:13 Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. KJV

OT: 1961 KJV-beacon, X altogether, be (-come), accomplished, committed, like), break, cause, come (to pass), do, faint, fall, + follow, happen, X have, last, pertain, quit (oneself-), require, X use.

NT: 407 andrizomai (an-drid’-zom-ahee); middle voice from NT: 435; to act manly: KJV-quit like men.

(Biblesoft’s New Exhaustive Strong’s Numbers and Concordance with Expanded Greek-Hebrew Dictionary. Copyright (c) 1994, Biblesoft, and International Bible Translators, Inc.)

Language changes constantly and not always for the best. Hundreds of years ago, the word silly meant holy according to one article that I read. If you heard someone say, " I saw a group of silly men walking towards the village awhile ago." They would have meant a group of devout men. My guess is that in an irreverent time like ours someone starting laughing at the silly men walking by and called them fools or idiots and the meaning switched to what we think of as silly today.